alt Hacker NewsSomething I realized with the new LLM tools is that learning how to type plain English words fast i.e. without capitalization or punctuation, and even typos is not that big of a problem anymore. And so it follows that code-specific typing is even less important if you can just type in normal words fast and then just check it's output. Although yes for stuff this small i.e. super small terminal commands I feel there does still exist an advantage.
Also, another observation I've had is sometimes I just don't feel like speaking, so voice as input to LLMs is really not an ALL time replacement in my personal opinion. In fact, I find myself preferring to type fast and with typos in lowercase much more than anything else.
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I’m seeing a lot of people that having that train of thought. I think that is a fallacy. I can understand that some LLM execution can be faster, but definitely not all. Agents need to explore, grep and get back up to speed to get context, if you have a good mental model, you can do changes or adaptions in <7s with a bunch of shortcuts or commands.
One could argue to find the <7s commands in your head takes you more mental power than to just wish it in to the LLM and whilst its running you can wish something else in another session, but I’m thinking that the cost of context is more important than the actual execution time for your task. Every extra task gets more expensive. It’s not a ressource where you have a limit, right from the 2nd task the cognitive load increases.
Therefore I’m thinking one task that can be done in one context window without switching is worth a load in these days of constant distraction.
I'm not sure. And to be honest, typing speed was never that big a deal. By the time I got out of college a few decades ago I was in the 110-120wpm range.
However as I progressed in my career as a developer what I found is that both my "working" WPM and then my "normal" WPM dropped over time. Once I moved out of truly junior, pure code grinding roles, I spent more and more time thinking, talking to people, etc than I did typing. At that point, what does it matter if I'm at 20wpm or 200?
Likewise, in day to day life, it's not like I'm sitting there typing a novel. I'm mostly clicking buttons, writing short messages, tweet,s and the like. My day to day typing speed has also decreased. I'm sure it's still up around 80-100wpm, but it's rare that I'm sitting there typing long enough to matter.
Same with LLM. Who cares if it takes me 10 seconds or 20 seconds to type in a prompt, when it's going to sit there and spin for a minute anyways?